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THE EYE-SPRING · ARSHILE GORKY
"Scab of darkness, cretinism intellectual cataract, symptom of the simplicism that directs our judgement ..." These severe expressions were employed by a great revolutionary writer, Charles Fourier, more than a century ago to characterize the mind of his time. THey still apply today, if one considers what, for the most part, is being accomplished in the way of painting--or writing. I say that the eye is not open when it is limited to the passive role of a mirror--even if the water of that mirror offers some interesting peculiarities: especially limpid, or sparkling, or boiling, or faceted--that eye impresses me as no less dead than the eye of a slaughtered steer if it has only the capacity to reflect--what if it reflects the object in one or in many aspects, in repose or in motion, in waking or in dream: The treasure of the eye is elsewhere! Most artists are still for turning around the hands of the clock, in every sense of the phrase without having the slightest concern for the spring hidden in the opaque case.
The eye-spring ... Arshile Gorky, for me the first painter to whom the secret has been completely revealed! Truly the eye was not made to take inventory like an auctioneer, nor to flirt with delusions and false recognitions like a maniac. It was made to cast a lineament, a conducting wire between the most heterogeneous things. Such a wire, of maximum ductility, should allow us to understand, in a minimum of time, the relationships which connect, without possible discharge of continuity, innumerable physical and mental structures. These relationships have been scrambled interminably by false laws of conventional proximity (the apple calls for a pear in the fruit compote) or of scientific classification (for better or worse the lobster and the spider are "brothers" under the shell). The key of the mental prison can only be found in a break from such absurd manners of perception; the key lies in a free unlimited play of analogies.
The register of analogies has been greatly extended and refined since the time when Fourier delighted in the discovery that a cabbage was the emblem of mysterious love and foresaw the establishing of a color scale enabling us "to know infallibly which passion is connected with what animal, vegetable or mineral hieroglyph." Rimbaud, Lautreamont and others have since travelled this road ... but the primitive claim is still open and one can admire today a canvas signed by Gorky, "The Liver is the Cock's Comb," which should be considered the great open door to the analogy world. 
Easy-going amateurs will come here for their meager rewards: in spite of all warning to the contrary they will insist on seeing in these compositions a still-life, a landscape, or a figure instead of daring to face the hybrid forms in which all human emotion is precipitated. By "hybrids" I mean the resultants provoked in an observer contemplating a natural spectacle with extreme concentration, the resultants being a combination of the spectacle and a flux of childhood and other memories, and the observer being gifted to a rare degree with the grace of emotion. In short it is my concern to emphasize that Gorky is, of all the surrealist artists, the only one who maintains direct contact with nature--sits down to paint before her. Furthermore, it is out of the question that he would take the expression of this nature as an end in itself--rightly he demands of her that she provide sensations that can serve as springboards for both knowledge and pleasure in fathoming certain profound states of mind. Whatever may be the subtle ways by which these states of mind choose to express themselves they stem from the wild and tender personality which Gorky hides, and share the sublime struggle of flowers growing toward the light of day. Here for the first time nature is treated as a cryptogram. The artist has a code by reason of his own sensitive anterior impressions, and can decode nature to reveal the very rhythm of life.
Here is an art entirely new, at the antipodes of those tendencies of today, fashion aiding confusion, which simulate surrealism by a limited and superficial counterfeit of its style. Here is the terminal of a most noble evolution, a most patient and rugged development which has been Gorky's for the past twenty years; the proof that only absolute purity of means in the service of unalterable freshness of impressions and the gift of unlimited effusion can empower a leap beyond the ordinary and the known to indicate, with an impeccable arrow of light, a real feeling of liberty.
ANDRÉ BRETON
(Translated by J.L.)